Skateboards vs. Cell phones

My family recently watched two coming-of age movies: Jonah Hill's Mid90s and Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. They both capture the lonely awkwardness of middle school (the former from a female perspective and the latter from a male perspective).

These are tough movies to watch, especially if you've got a genuine awkward middle schooler living in your house, enduring these very particular struggles (and we do). Middle school was a long time ago for me, but these films (and my son) remind me that it's a tough age, odd and half-baked. There's this inchoate desire to want to be something and want to belong to something, before you've become anything. Before you know what that something is.

Middle school is all about putting the cart before the horse, but carts and horses are passé . . . so instead we're dealing with skateboards and cell-phones.

Eighth Grade begins with a video: Kayla's advice vlog. But it's really self-help. No one is watching. Kayla mainly lives inside her phone. Her forays into the outside world are awkward and ugly. She encounters traditional mean girls, who are more adept at living in the real world-- mainly because they are better looking-- but even the mean girls still shield themselves from the ugly reality of middle school with technology.

Kayla has several unpleasant confrontations with people in meat space: a middle school crush who turns out to be a pervert, a creepy senior boy, and a couple of bitchy girls. She handles all of the situations with as much grace as she can muster, and learns that there's a bigger (and possibly better) world just ahead, in high school (that will have it's own perils and pitfalls, digital and analog).

The movie captures how important the digital world is to teenage girls. It's all consuming, and-- paradoxically-- it both ameliorates loneliness and amplifies it.

Ostensibly, Mid90s is the more hardcore movie of the two. It certainly hearkens back to the gritty documentary feel of Larry Clark's Kids.

Eighth Grade begins with Kayla's amateur video . . . because with the advent of the cell phone, amateur video is ubiquitous. Mid90s ends with a video, and it took some time and work to make. This symbolizes the difference between the two worlds.

Fourth Grade-- who aspires to be either a film director or work at the DMV like his dad-- diligently compiles footage for the length of the film. The video takes hard work and complete dedication. Fourth Grade is the only one filming. The rest of the gang lives out their life on the streets, and they live large. There are no cell phones to disappear inside, to buffer reality. They do it all in public: skate, trespass, drink, do drugs, party, evade the police, fight, and bond.

Stevie, the twelve year old at the center of this story, frequently gets beaten up by domineering older brother. Stevie takes some hard hard falls. He gets hurt, he recovers. He gets hurt for real.

Both films are about that protean time when you might be anything, anyone. And which is the better place to experiment and explore (and possibly get hurt). Reality or social media?

Which is worse? Which is better?

Should youngsters develop their identities in digital space, like Kayla does? There are so many scenes in Eighth Grade where she's so terribly alone. Her dad tries to help and understand, but it's like he's talking from another planet. Her emotions are real, but she's in no actual danger. We know she's going to pull through and flourish in high school (but that's not the case for everyone . . . social media has been linked with depression).

Mid90s abounds with real danger. Some of these kids are not going to make it. But they're having a helluva time skating and partying. And some of them are learning lessons. Ray goes straight-edge and decides he is going to make it out. He's got aspirations and has given up on the drinking and slacker nihilism. Fuckshit, not so much. And Stevie is a coin toss. But they're all going to have amazing memories of a wild time when they skated, hung out, partied, and seized life by the balls. And no one remembers anything from the internet.

Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe social media is just another teen fad, like skateboarding. The rest of us old people, searching for eternal youth, have appropriated it. Maybe we'll all wake up in a few years from this fever dream of posting and liking and trying to go viral, and think: what the hell was that? And the kids will lead the way out. They'll start doing something else. VR sports. Massive holographic sculptures. Levitation.

Or I could be totally wrong. Maybe social media really is the crucible where future generations will form their identity. And what is the role of adults in these worlds? We know what to do when kids are skateboarding and drinking and doing vandalism. We yell at them, call the cops, run them off. It's easy enough. The kids scatter and go somewhere else to hang out.

But the internet is too big for that.

Maybe when this generation sees the effects of the social media lifestyle-- the vacuous distracting time-suck; the lack of concentration; the depression and loneliness and FOMO; the lack of anything substantive, memorable or insignificant-- they will change. Most of us have learned by now that if the internet was a book, no one would buy it or read it. Case and point: this shitty, half-thought out post. It's self-help, like Kayla's video, but putting it online gets me to think harder. It helps me work through it. But does the rest of the world need to see it? Probably not.

So things might change. People might wake up. I have hope for that. What gives me the most hope?

Crack cocaine.

Crack gives me hope. Or the lack of crack. Because the social media environment of the internet might be like the rise and fall of a heavily abused drug. Which particular drug? It doesn't matter. The podcast The Uncertain Hour has been doing a detailed history of the opioid crisis. They began with an episode about the crack epidemic of the 1980's.

What happened to crack?

One theory is that the reason the abuse of certain drugs rise and fall is that it takes a certain amount of time to see the devastating effects of addiction to that drug. Crack was supposed to destroy our nation, but people saw the effects: crack babies and crack dens and crack addiction, the drug was stigmatized. Crack still exists, but it's not an epidemic, not even on the radar. The same with acid. People saw the effects and most stopped. Hopefully, the same will happen with heroin, fentanyl, and oxy. People will get educated, get woke, and move on.

Could the same thing happen with the internet? Will some future generation collectively shut off the screens, dust off their skateboards, and head out into the world? Recognize the banality and stupidity of flicking through tiny images?

My older son was certainly inspired by Mid90s. But he was already a skateboarder, with his own rig. The film was preaching to the choir. He likes to film himself doing tricks. He rides around without a helmet. He lets our dog pull him while he's on his board. It's totally dangerous and he's going to get hurt. He's already been hit by a car, and he wasn't even on his board. It's scary, so I don't watch. But I still think it's probably better than living inside a phone. The trouble inside a phone is more abstract, but the emotions are real. And stuff posted on the internet can go viral, it can get amplified. And it has the potential to be permanent. A broken arm heals, but you never know on the internet. Some of that stuff never goes away.

Still, I'm not sure where I stand on this. Doing stuff on the internet can be fun and creative and rewarding, just as doing stuff in meat space can be the same. There's potential and danger in both zones. And both zones often bleed into each other.

One of the best takes on this is the Atlanta episode "The Woods." Check it out. If adults struggle to navigate between reality and social media, how are middle schoolers supposed to figure it out?

Analog and binary and the stuff in between. Mainly, we are left with questions.

Which is a safer space for kids? Which one is healthier and more relevant? Which space is better a place for experimentation? A better place to form your identity?

Are these even our questions to ask? Maybe not. The kids will figure out. I hope I'm around to see what evolves, but I know my understanding will be biased. I'm too fucking old to get it.